High energy polymers are a class of materials of interest as explosives and propellants. In addition, some of these high energy polymers may be precursors to conductive polymers.
Conductive polymers currently represent an active area of research in polymer science. Polyacetylene (PA) has been at the center stage throughout the evolution of this field with a conductivity that can be increased with doping to values that rival copper. PA and many other conductive polymers are insoluble, infusible materials with low tensile strength, and thus manipulation of these materials into useful shapes and morphologies is limited.
One solution to these material and processing problems has been the use of soluble precursor polymers that can be transformed into conductive polymers. Precursor routes have afforded the synthesis of materials with higher molecular weights and highly ordered anisotropic morphologies.
One major drawback to the existing precursor routes is that they generally rely on the extrusion of molecular fragments. These extruded fragments may comprise a substantial fraction of the total mass, and thus potentially limit the usefulness of these processes. The development of precursor routes that do not rely on the extrusion of small molecules is therefore desirable.